Francoise Gilot-Salk

Ask Françoise Gilot about her approach to painting and she'll quickly admit to feeling a kind of appeal in front of an empty white canvas -- waiting to fill its void with a restless thrust of energy. However, by nature, Gilot does not begin a new canvas to verify what she knows, but rather to engage in an equation with the unknown through the balance of shape and form, signs and symbols. When combined with her masterful orchestration of color, Gilot infuses her canvases with luminosity and radiating depth without a reliance on traditional perspective.

In the summer of 1958, Gilot embarked on a new series of canvases that represent her first sustained statements of a truly personal style and are central to her development as an artist. Inspired by the interiors of greenhouses in Paris and Kew Gardens outside London, works such as Vegetation #1 evolved from recognizable gardens and schematized landscapes to distilled, formal arrangements of lines and flat planes of color suggesting the visual equivalents of filtered light, vegetation and plant growth.

Deftly composing a space – or environment – with color planes rather than linear perspective, Gilot creates an organic, structural rhythm, reflecting her concerns for simplicity and tone-color coordination. Wishing to evoke the correspondence between the filtered light, refracted by the multiple planes of greenhouse glass and the lush vegetation, areas of black appear to be against the light, blue areas in shadow; leaves and stem structures stylized and rhythmically repeated as patterns of green lines. Not concerned with an exact pictorial description, Gilot prefers to heighten the chromatic scale of the relationships with a kind of musical spirit, conveying organic growth, the suggestion of a climate and the perception of fractured, mottled light.

Born in 1921 in Neuilly, near Paris, Gilot abandoned her university studies in international law in the early 1940s to devote herself to the pursuit of painting. Her first exhibition was in 1943, when she was only 21 years old. During the 1940s and 1950s, Gilot developed strong friendships with the legendary artists of the time, including Matisse, Braque and Cocteau.

She also began a well-known 11-year partnership with Pablo Picasso, then 40 years her senior, with whom she had two children, Claude and Paloma. Gilot's youngest daughter, Aurelia, was born during Gilot's marriage in the mid 1950s to French artist, Luc Simon. By the late 1960s, she was an internationally recognized artist and best-selling author.

In 1970, Gilot married Dr. Jonas Salk, less than a year after mutual friends in La Jolla introduced them. Gilot knew the science of art and Dr. Salk was known for his encouragement of artistic approaches to science. She maintained studios in New York, Paris and California, and their partnership was a vital international presence in art circles, as well as in the scientific community, for 25 years. And although Gilot returned to live in New York following Dr. Salk's death in 1995, she has graciously continued to serve as Honorary Chair of Symphony at Salk -- A Concert Under the Stars each year since its inauguration in 1996.

Sponsorships

Sponsorship opportunities will be announced in early 2012 spring.